With generative AI and anyone able to make pretty high resolution images and videos themselves due to technology, the bar for "great special effects" people would pay for has gone up signficantly. Green screens are less in vogue than I'd say on location shooting. There was a realness in Oppenheimer actually filming in New Mexico that a green screen just couldn't capture.

With streaming, serialized dramas are a dime a dozen.

For people to pay for a theater experience, uniqueness, sense of community watching with others, and great storytelling are going to be what gets more and more attention. Took a while but we were due for some type of readjustment as the formulaic films coming out were getting pretty horrendous.

I think it’s more franchise fatigue considering the newer ones breaking out. MI7 failing to do Mi3 adjusted is probably the most shocking to me this year.

Mission Impossible came down to overconfidence and a black swan type event.

On the one hand, Paramount/Cruise were still basking in the aura of TGM so assumed that film's success would be good in itself to raise the profile for Mission Impossible. So they got overconfident.

Then they were so overconfident they were missing the signals coming in that Barbenheimer was looking to be a major movie and cultural zeitgeist event. To open a movie the weekend before sealed Mission's fate. They absolutely should have moved the release date but didn't